Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/264

250 source and omit the necessity for the preservation of the race as not being actually necessary. But only apparently. The impulse for race preservation is as much stronger than the impulse for individual self-preservation, as the vital energies and strength of the race are more powerful than those of the individual. It has never yet happened that a considerable body of human beings, an entire tribe, were prevented for any considerable length of time from obeying their natural impulse to perpetuate the race. If such a case should ever happen, if there should ever arrive a general national sex-famine, the most horrible scenes of days of famine that the world has ever seen would fade into insignificance compared with the passions and acts of violence that would then be seen. The two great organic wants of mankind must hence be satisfied; every thing beyond these is of secondary importance. It is possible for an individual whose appetite is fully satisfied, who is protected from the cold, with a shelter against the wind and rain over his head and a companion of the opposite sex by his side, to be not only contented but absolutely happy and without further desires. A hungry individual can not be happy nor even contented, even if he were dressed in gold brocade and listening to a magnificent orchestral concert in the Vatican Museum. This is so self-evident that it is absurd to state it. It is the prosaic moral of the fable of the cock who found a pearl and complained because it was not a grain of corn. And yet this truism is beyond the mental grasp of the official political economy. It has never occurred to any of the professors of this sublime science to test their doctrines by the homely wisdom of Lafontaine's book of fables. Applied to the development of our civilization in regard the matters of political or national economy, the fable of the cock and the pearl means simply this: "Less